Okay, so this is entirely new to me. Sparrow is was an email client for Mac OS X and iOS (and Windows), which brought a decent Gmail experience to these platforms - as opposed to Apple's own not-so-good Gmail support and Google's Gmail iOS application which, well, is just a webpage. Google has now acquired Sparrow, and basically all hell has broken loose, to the point of Rian van der Merwe writing that 'we' lost "faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens".

You want it Opensource. Which license? GPL is incompatible - unless you want everyone to jailbreak. Apache or MIT? Then someone can clone the code (like the Pakastani app factories) and there will be 100 $0.99 apps that do gmail, each called something slightly different, but alphabetized, or marginally localized or something so they get the revenue, not the original author.

GPL enforces sharing, so a project could form around a GMail client, but iOS prohibits it.

So there is nothing between GPL which cannot be done on iOS and fully proprietary.

Calling it a "walled garden" doesn't make it not a prison-farm. You are locked up and down, and there are armed guard towers and razor wire. You can't leave except by dying. And now one bit got paroled. Don't worry, someone soon will be incarcerated to replace the lass.

Apache or MIT? Then someone can clone the code (like the Pakastani app factories) and there will be 100 $0.99 apps that do gmail, each called something slightly different, but alphabetized, or marginally localized or something so they get the revenue, not the original author.